{"id":1702,"date":"2017-12-15T06:17:25","date_gmt":"2017-12-15T11:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/?p=1702"},"modified":"2017-12-15T13:44:56","modified_gmt":"2017-12-15T18:44:56","slug":"signcommand-good-powerpoint-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2017\/12\/15\/signcommand-good-powerpoint-better\/","title":{"rendered":"SignCommand Good, PowerPoint Better"},"content":{"rendered":"

This fall, Liberty-Benton installed an electronic sign in front of the high school. \u00a0I was asked to help with the management of the content that is displayed on the sign and to train others who would help with content creation.<\/p>\n

The software that came with our sign is SignCommand<\/a>. \u00a0It is web-based and comes with 178 pre-programmed animations. \u00a0It is not possible to edit the animations or customize them in any way. \u00a0A large proportion of the animation library is church, retail and organization specific. \u00a0There are some generic animations that say things like \u201cdon\u2019t drink and drive\u201d, \u201cdon\u2019t text and drive\u201d, and \u201cspeed a little, pay a lot\u201d.. Most importantly, not a single animation in the library says \u201cLiberty-Benton\u201d on it.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nMost of the animations in the SignCommand library are eye-catching. \u00a0Text pops on the screen and the background moves around. \u00a0They were probably created with a 3D animation program, but no one at my school has experience using 3D software.\u00a0 On the other hand, everyone knows how to use PowerPoint.\u00a0 To me, this was a problem most easily solved with PowerPoint.<\/p>\n

The sign will accept content in the form of an MP4 movie. \u00a0Since a PowerPoint slide deck can be exported as an MP4, there are minimal extra steps to go from PowerPoint to the sign.<\/p>\n

I created an LB PowerPoint template<\/a> that was the correct size. \u00a0The template also includes example text that is adequate size for legibility on the sign. \u00a0You can see from the picture above, the sign has very low resolution. \u00a0If you count the pixels, there are only 32 from top to bottom. \u00a0Left to right there are only 112 pixels. \u00a0How big is that? \u00a0Here is a picture that is 112×32 pixels.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I created a PowerPoint slide that looked like this.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It looked like this on the sign.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can see that it is a bus, but most of the detail beyond that is lost.<\/p>\n

I found that fonts formatted to 150 points on the provided template were large enough to easily read on the sign. \u00a0At that size, two lines of text can be displayed on one slide, and about eighteen characters fit on one line. \u00a0We use a few acronyms to make it work.<\/p>\n

JH Girls Basketball
\n9th Boys Basketball
\nES Movie Night<\/p>\n

Most of the slides are programmed to advance after three seconds. \u00a0At that rate, we can cycle through two day\u2019s worth of events in the time it takes for the red light to change to green at the intersection beside the school.<\/p>\n

I plan to create several posts in a series explaining how we create content for our sign using only PowerPoint. \u00a0Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This fall, Liberty-Benton installed an electronic sign in front of the high school. \u00a0I was asked to help with the management of the content that is displayed on the sign and to train others who would help with content creation. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,10,209],"tags":[374,131,373,372],"class_list":["post-1702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","category-education","category-presentation","tag-electronic","tag-powerpoint","tag-sign","tag-signcommand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1713,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}